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Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

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Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#81

> It’s not about the quality of the talent. It’s a simple supply and demand question. Uh oh. "Programmers are a commodity" again.

Lots of things that you or I think are unique and special can be modeled as commodities. VCs model startups as commodities when they're preparing forecasts. Recruiters model high powered executives as commodities when they're preparing an interview pipeline. Like all abstractions, it's sometimes useful, and sometimes misleading. Certainly it's nothing worth getting excited about as a passing comment by the author.

I'm not quite sure that VCs model startups as commodities, considering that you get these huge pile-ons where everyone wants to invest in Twitter or Zynga but nobody wants to invest in the random startup your roommate founded. If startups actually behaved as commodities, brand names wouldn't matter so much.

Ditto high-powered executives - if they were actually commodities, executive pay wouldn't skyrocket through the roof.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#82

I feel that the author just didn't try any other technologies. > I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation I find this hard to believe. Again I think the author knows his way around Microsoft products, and is biased towards it. > Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source. It just is. I find this statement self-justifying and false. If a…

> I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation I find this hard to believe. Why do you find it hard to believe? ASP.NET is really well documented. Is it absolutely the best documented product in the world, but it is reasonable that someone doing an investigation could reasonably believe that ASP.NET has the best documentation.

It's the choice of words, really. does it have good documentation, or thorough documentation?

The author's argument would be twice as compelling if he backed such a strong statement up, or toned it down a bit.

Unmatched? Mmmkay.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#83

I think ASP.Net is a pretty smart move even if you do have a strong CS background and know a few other platforms. The basic reason is that Microsoft stuff performs really well and you won't have to worry about a lot of problems for a very long time. Chances are one or two webservers will handle your page requests for quite some time before you need to start thinking about it. ASP.Net's sessions also work very well wi…

By what metric does Microsoft stuff perform really well? You're seriously saying you choose Microsoft for performance and stability? And you have a dozen upvotes?

.NET actually isn't that bad as far as performance and stability go. It's about on par with Java. It's much faster than scripting languages, and significantly more stable than Ruby.

Administering a Windows stack can sometimes blow, but the languages and virtual machines themselves are relatively solid.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#85

I think ASP.Net is a pretty smart move even if you do have a strong CS background and know a few other platforms. The basic reason is that Microsoft stuff performs really well and you won't have to worry about a lot of problems for a very long time. Chances are one or two webservers will handle your page requests for quite some time before you need to start thinking about it. ASP.Net's sessions also work very well wi…

By what metric does Microsoft stuff perform really well? You're seriously saying you choose Microsoft for performance and stability? And you have a dozen upvotes?

Since Windows 7, I'm not surprised to see someone connecting Microsoft with performance and stability.

(I'm pointing out MS had worse days, and is catching up seriously. I also realize an OS for home users might not be the best evidence in the world.)

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#86
You know why you don't have a good reason for choosing a language? Because you are a total programming newbie who hasn't actually tried to use other languages for anything!

If you use a better language, you will add features faster and spend less time fixing bugs, and you will be making the world a better place.

Your logic is naive at best, and awful at worst: "It just is." isn't an argument anyone should take seriously.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#87
post #5

I disagree. For starters, I care what I build my site in. I'd have a lot more fun using say python or (if I'm lucky) lisp or Haskell than I would using PHP. And more fun = easier. Secondly, developers who might join your company are going to care. Developers are more than the technologies on their resumes. Good ones can learn new technologies quickly. And they might even be happier learning something new. This view i…

If you are hacking just for the sake of hacking then you are absolutely right. You should choose the technology based on how fun it is. But soon you will need to worry about how to pay the server and the bandwidth invoices. That time the business people's opinion will probably sound better.

Even for hacking, it is generally better to choose the technology that your core set of technical people are most comfortable with.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#88
post #75

"I don't know anything about programming, therefore my first choice is best." Sure, that makes sense. (It also follows from this logic that cheap programmers are a good thing to have. If you need to do twice as much work, you just hire twice as many programmers! Combined with an IDE, you're sure to succeed!)

That's my go-to argument when choosing languages. Whenever someone says to use Java or .NET rather than the relatively obscure Ruby (or Node.js or whatever) because that makes it easier to find programmers, I always ask why they want to staff up on average to below average programmers. (Edit: sure there are good ones, just far more bad ones) At least if they use the obscure language, you know that the programmer in q…

You're going to find the full range of talent regardless of which language you're using. Erlang doesn't guarantee godlike competence, and .NET doesn't guarantee mediocrity. I think your biases are showing a little here.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#89

I don't think a startup that is not fundamentally technical has much to say about the merits of different technologies. This is a startup, and it's innovative, but it doesn't rely on the technology. Technology is just one piece of the puzzle for this kind of company. The company could succeed even if the technology were junk. Let's say he had a competitor who had a similar business model. They're competing on pricing…

Succeeding harder if the technology was junk is one assumption you might agree with.

Furthermore, from your list, anything that's not business is technology. Not every company ships physically, and those who don't just ship their product through the stack.

How fundamentally technical the startup is, is not decided by the owner but by the context. And technology matters there, a lot.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#90

The people who come along later to scale to those millions of users your site attracted might.

Perhaps you would be interested in purchasing my Scaling Insurance? It costs a ton upfront, and it's likely to kill your nascent company, but if you ever make it big, you'll save a tiny bit of money in the long run!

Call them Scaling Default Swaps - insurance is regulated!
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